


Your Voice as Clear as Day

by MissCoppelia



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Heavy Angst, Post-Canon, all the feels, reylo mentions, rffa discord spawn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2019-11-28 04:20:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18203432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissCoppelia/pseuds/MissCoppelia
Summary: It wasn’t supposed to be like this.Ben was supposed to land at the Resistance Base, where his mother and Rey would welcome him and he would join their fight. He was looking forward to seeing Leia again, almost more so than Rey, but...





	Your Voice as Clear as Day

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by [this gorgeous piece of fan art by nataly-leyton on Tumblr](http://nataly-leyton.tumblr.com/post/183551061410/will-always-love-you), the resulting chat in the Reylo Fanfiction Anthology discord, and also my father's death a few months ago. 
> 
> The piece is a little reylo, but that's really not the focus so much as everything going on with Ben. Please keep that in mind, as well as the things that inspired this fic, when commenting.
> 
> Also thank you to [Zabeta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabeta/pseuds/Zabeta) for beta-reading this fic!

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.  
  
Ben was supposed to land at the Resistance Base, where his mother and Rey would welcome him and he would join their fight. He was looking forward to seeing Leia again, almost more so than Rey.  
  
It had been so long since they’d last seen each other, and he had thought of her so much since he nearly blew up the bridge on the Raddus. Thank the Force Leia had survived that. He couldn’t wait to feel her arms embrace him again as if he were a child. Her child once again. They would do what he and Han could not.

There had been something in the midst of his escape. A familiar feeling. One Ben couldn’t concentrate on because, if he had, he would have been shot out of the sky and never made it to his mother’s arms. By the time he landed, he had forgotten all about it, pushed to the back of his mind, the echo of it quietly throbbing underneath the surface. He thought it was just nerves and adrenaline.

Rey was there with tears in her eyes. Ben thought they were for him, and hugged her tightly, excited that they were together in the flesh again after speaking over the Bond for so long. Then he heard Chewbacca roar his name as the wookie enters the docking bay, with C-3PO babbling close behind.

“Master Chewbacca, Rey asked us not to say anything just yet!”

The words fly out of his mouth. “About what?”

Another roar from Chewie tells him what and time begins to move strangely. Rey breaks down sobbing against his chest and apologizing, and it’s like the room stretches and nothing is real. There’s a rush of corridors before he’s gazing down on his mother’s lifeless body. She looks like she might wake up, just a few light cuts on her face, but there’s a sheet and someone stops him before he can lift it.

That’s when he flies into a rage worthy of his former self. He knows he’s screaming, he knows his lightsaber is on in one hand and his other is taut, crunching a metal panel a few feet away and making it fly. There’s noise around him, there’s a familiar burning smell, but his mind is dark as night because this wasn’t how things were supposed to happen.

Ben only stops when Rey latches onto him and he realizes he might hurt her.  

The next few days are a blur. Rey is in and out of the quarters they gave him after he calmed down.  
  
“You can come out to the canteen for meals,” she tells him, but he doesn’t. Instead she joins him with plates of food. Nothing he puts in his mouth is as it should be. Even when it tastes good, there’s no enjoyment in it. When he puts too much in his mouth, his eyes start to swell with tears. So he eats very little, birdlike bites. He finds he doesn’t miss food much.

Rey stays by his side at the funeral, dabbing at her own tears. A lot of people talk about a woman he never knew, and yet it’s still the same person as his mother. In truth, he’d rather close his eyes and sleep than listen to their choked out words, but he has to stand there as people come up to him to offer their condolences like they give a bantha’s ass about him. It’s exhausting having to repeat the same phrases over and over.  
  
He goes back in his quarters and stays there. Rey is at his side as much as she can be in the middle of a war. She understands the loss, the absence of something that should be there, but not the magnitude of a mother’s lifelong love gone. He keeps it from her, steeling himself against the Bond that threatens to share all their hidden parts. Ben doesn’t know how to even begin to share that loss with her without overwhelming the both of them, and if he does, will he have to carry on with his life like his mother wasn’t torn from him? Can he even do that now? Rey kisses him and tries to soothe him all the same.  
  
Still, he keeps thinking it will all just be a trick and he’ll receive a holo from her like when he was training at the Jedi temple. She’ll say a quick hello and ask how he’s doing before rambling on about a few things that happened to her lately. But the holo never comes.

The worst part is when he can’t sleep at night and both sides of his pillow get too wet from unwelcome tears that sneak up on him. His brain will trick him into calming down, then some thought of his mother will pop up and he starts sobbing again. Eventually he asks C3PO for some sleeping pills because he’s so sick of it. It doesn’t change much; he still cries before he passes out from exhaustion. And when he is awake, the moment someone leaves him to take care of other business, he’s curled back up on his bunk, drifting away. Not many visit him other than Rey anyway.

It surprises him when he’s woken up by soft, twangy beeping in his room. Even half-asleep he recognizes it as a conversation. When he finally sits up, the orange and white BB unit he once chased stops talking and slowly moves out of his room, leaving only his uncle’s old droid. Where had he been stored all this time?

“R2?”

R2-D2 lets out a soft whine followed by a few beeps, and before Ben can protest, a light flickers on and his mother is young before him.

“General Kenobi. Years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars. Now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire.”

Tears begin to stream down Ben’s face. He has only seen the holo a few times, in actuality. Something they never really talked about more than a handful of times. He forgot how pretty she once was, though he still thought her beautiful and elegant as she aged. But the pictures of her from these years made him understand why his father fell hopelessly in love.

“I regret that I am unable to present my father’s request to you in person, but my ship has fallen under attack and I’m afraid my mission to bring you to Alderaan has failed,” his mother says, steady and quick.

She had told him about that day, about how important it was. And his Uncle Luke had told him how it had been to see her for the first time, how drawn to her he had felt.

“I have placed information vital to the survival of the Rebellion into the memory systems of this R2 unit. My father will know how to retrieve it.”

If it weren’t for this very message, Ben wouldn’t be alive right now to gaze down at this holo, remembering how she used to play with his hair. Or how she smiled at him when they were doing something a little mischievous. The memories rush back now, and Ben is grateful for them.

“You must see this droid safely delivered to him on Alderaan,” She continues before her voice softens. “This is our most desperate hour. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”

As his mother turns to look behind her and turn off the droid recording, Ben knows he will be alright. He can feel her inside him again, just as strong and as stubborn as ever, her face and her love etched into his heart once more.  
  
He kneels at the droid’s treads and wraps his arms around R2, like he did when he was a boy. The tears are still there, both happy and sad this time, as he decides to do what would make her most proud.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading everyone.


End file.
